Restoring real choice

The political situation at the start of 2006 is remarkably changed from anything that anyone alive today has known for at least a generation. Put it this way: when was the last time there was a serious case for being able to contemplate a vote for any one of the three main parties? Not since 1979, certainly, and even that distant election - Margaret Thatcher's first as Conservative leader - would be a nomination too far for very many. Go back beyond that and, for all the Butskellite consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s, you are into the era in which the class roots of both the Tories and Labour were a stricter determining factor than today and in which the predecessors of the Liberal Democrats were mostly stuck at the margins of the bigger picture. In any case, the youngest voter in that 1979 contest is 44 years old now. So no one younger has lived their adult life through a period in which there was a greater convergence between the three main parties and it is arguable that none of us, of whatever generation, has ever been in such a place before.

It is tempting to say that the principal author of this convergence is David Cameron, the new Conservative leader. Barely known to the wider public six months ago, Mr Cameron has managed, in less than a month since succeeding Michael Howard, to put a new face on the Tory party, and perhaps new substance behind it too. With a few brisk strokes, Mr Cameron has, in the space of a mere four weeks, shifted the party's stance on important subjects such as gender equality, development aid, immigration, the environment and student finance. He has sounded a new note by disinterring the notion and the language of liberal Toryism and has been immediately rewarded by a decent bounce in public support for his party. These are very early days and it may all prove before long to be more superficial than substantive. Yet it is clearly something more than an electoral stance. When Mr Cameron talks about compassionate conservatism, we think he means it. It is a fascinating and important development and Mr Cameron was entitled, in his New Year message, to claim that these are exciting times for Conservatives.

Yet the true architect of this new political situation is not Mr Cameron but the prime minister. To understand the new convergence it is essential to treat Tony Blair's achievement seriously. Over a decade and more, Mr Blair has pushed and pulled his almost moribund party into its still commanding position at the centre of British politics by juggling a programme of economic competitiveness with social justice. To anyone who remembers the triumphalist combination of economic liberalism and possessive individualism that were the hallmarks of 1980s Thatcherism, this is still an amazing achievement, however imperfect it often appears. If Margaret Thatcher is the maker of the Blair Labour party, it is equally true that Mr Blair is the maker of the Cameron Conservative party. In that sense, Mr Blair's legacy already exists.

Of course, this poses existential difficulties for the Lib Dems, whose recovery from near extinction in the 50s and 60s was made possible by the lurch to the left in the 1970s Labour party and by the Tories' lurch to the right a decade later - lurches which those parties have firmly renounced. The Lib Dems' agonising, and the pressure on Charles Kennedy, are direct results of the new Labour-Tory convergence, but this does not invalidate the case for a party which, for the most part, is more truly in tune with the public's current mood than large parts of either the Labour or the Tory grassroots. In 2006, all three parties face enormous challenges to prove themselves masters of the new situation. But there should be no regrets at the sudden emergence of a three-way contest at the heart of British politics. On the contrary, compared with everything that has come before, it is a cause for real celebration.